Juan GRIS - PIPE, TABAC, VERRE ET JOURNAL 1919 His search for beauty generated magnificent works, especially still lifes where objects from daily life - a glass, bottle, cigarette pack and newspaper ** - take place of pride. Nature morte au journal, 1916, (The Philips Collection, Washington D.C.) (fig.2) or Bouteille, verre et pipe, dated 1917, (Musée d'Art moderne in Grenoble) (fig.3) both attest to his remarkable ability to interlace objects with a combination of straight and complex lines. Gradually but over a short period of time, his paintings move away from objective reality in a complex game of planes against objects. According to Golding***, Juan Gris was the first artist to respond to a questionnaire entitled «Chez les cubistes» sent out by the Bulletin de la vie artistique published in January 1925, «by making the distinction between the early analytic period in cubist painting, which he considered purely descriptive, [...] and the subsequent phase in which Ôthe analysis of the past has become a synthesis'». Pipe, tabac, verre et journal dated 1919, a superb cubist still life, illustrates a new state of affairs where objects and their location in space form a synthetic whole. The title of the newspaper («Le Journal») can be read in a shortened form, coded into four letters: «LE» followed by «AL». The soft, natural colors include white, gray-blue, light brown, and black arranged in an independent pattern that creates a play of color totally liberated from the objects themselves. When Waldemar George wrote in l'Esprit nouveau that «a work by Gris is always a tour de force -- only a very great artist who is also a keen theoretician can deal with esthetic problems as he does», he was referring to paintings like Pipe, tabac, verre et journal, where reason and imagination combine to create a novel realism, a fresh style - the synthetic cubist idiom. *Born José Victoriano Gonzalez, he adopted the name Juan Gris in 1902 when he began contributing drawings to comic magazines such as L'Assiette au beurre ou Le Charivari. ** Le Journal was a popular daily paper that Picasso used primarily in his collages during the winter of 1912-1913 and that Juan Gris used many times in his paintings and drawings. *** in Pierre Daix, Dictionnaire Picasso, Robert Laffont, Paris, p. 229. LITERATURE: Juan Gris, Peintures et dessins 1887-1927, Marseilles, Musée Cantini, 17 September 1998 - 3 January 1999 (L'idée de "Juan Gris" by Christopher Green et Un cubisme à huis clos par Rainer Rochlitz). Fig. 1: Hommage à Picasso, 1912, oil on canvas, 93 x 74 cm, Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, Don de Leigh B. Block; Fig. 2: Nature morte au journal, 1916, oil on canvas, 73 x 60 cm, the Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.; Fig. 3: Bouteille, verre et pipe, circa 1917, lead pencil on paper, 36 x 27 cm, Musée d'Art moderne, Grenoble